Nathan: So why didn't you just write a memoir? Clearly this is not a light summer reading kind of book... but that is not just because of the content, but also because of the way you structured the narrative.  What were the reasons you made specific stylistic choices? 

Can you be more specific about why you think your experience has a truth to it that the experience of others lacks? You say This is love, but it is also an extraordinary amount of pain and suffering. Do you think the pain is required for authentic love? 

Jeremy: Mm. Okay, so I've been writing and hitting the delete key, over and over here, as I've been trying to respond to these questions.

So, to the first question. Here's the thing. I wrote in response to the demands of the story. The specific details, the events, the history, were already in place, and so I had to find a form which accommodated that. Which, you might think, would point in the direction of writing a memoir. But it's one thing to have a story, inside of yourself, that you want to tell, and another thing entirely to transport that story, to render it as an intelligible narrative. And what I realized, as I went along, was that I wasn't interested in writing a memoir. That the story I wanted to tell demanded a narrative freedom, that it needed the liberty and space afforded by a novel, in order to go where it wanted to go.

Finding that narrative freedom was a more difficult process in the rough draft, a process which was hindered by that need to stick to the historical facts. But after I'd gotten all that out, I was able to come back to it, and really find the story; to approach it as an author, a creative technician, and to draw out the story I wanted to tell. An early reader--of the finished book, not the rough draft--said that I was "brilliant with the language of fantasy." Which, is not to toot my own horn; but rather, to indicate that I wrote the story I wanted to write, the way I wanted to write it.

Now, to the second question. First, a very important clarification: I don't mean to say that my "experience has a truth to it that the experience of others lacks." Much the opposite, in fact. I think the truth of it is something that's recognizable, that will resonate. What I meant was the truth of this story, in relation to other stories. Actual lived experience is one thing, and stories are another. Telling a story involves making a set of choices; and as often as not, the choices that are made have nothing to do with telling things that are true. Because the truth is frequently not what people want to hear. Take the Bill Cosby story, for example. It's an awful story, and there were a number of women telling it, for a very long time. But no one wanted to listen, because they had this precious idea of the story of Bill Cosby, a thing that they internalized as a component of their own identities, their own senses of self. When the story finally broke, what struck me was how people talked about it; sad not because of the violence done to these women, but the violence done to their image of Bill Cosby. Again, his victims had come forth any number of times, there were plenty of people who knew what was going on. But it took this flood, this final rising tide to break the levees of what people wanted to believe about Bill Cosby, and what they instead finally, painfully, had to accept as the truth.

Truth frequently entails pain. People want to avoid that. But avoidance just makes it worse; just makes the thing that you're hiding from darker and worse, until it grows to the point where it breaks into the open, until it can't be avoided anymore. And by then, it's a much larger and darker monster than it was to begin with. The "extraordinary amount of pain and suffering" that you referred to, as being a part of the book I wrote. That level of pain and suffering was the direct result of a truth that had been avoided, had been hidden away and allowed to grow into exactly that kind of dark monster. And yes, I think that authentic love entails pain, because it entails empathy and sacrifice, it requires a kind of heroism. And the point of the book is to emphasize that heroism, to point to it as something that human beings can rise to, that it's a capacity within ourselves. That maybe pain and suffering are a part of the journey, yes, to a possibly extraordinary degree. But that ultimately there is no darkness that cannot be overcome, by the true power in the core of love.

Part 3